This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to inferring target clusters of users based on social connections in a social networking system.
Traditional targeting criteria for advertising relies on demographic data and structured information, such as a user's self-declared interests and intentions to be marketable, i.e., to be in the market to purchase a product or service. Advertisers, in an effort to locate and target these users purchase analytical data gathered by third parties that track users visiting websites related to the advertiser's product. For example, websites on the Internet track people comparing car prices and filling out a form for a test drive at a local dealership and sell this information to advertisers. Advertisers may also target specific types of publishers or pages within a publisher's network in an effort to reach their intended audience (e.g., ads on Cars.com or the cars category on Yahoo to reach users who are believed to be in the market to buy a car.) But in the end, advertisers are limited to educated guessing at a user's intent to purchase or a user's interest in a particular subject matter.
In recent years, users of social networking systems have shared their interests, attributes, and affiliations, engaging with other users of the social networking systems by sharing photos, real-time status updates, and playing social games. The amount of information gathered from users is staggering—information describing recent moves to a new city, political preferences, causes, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like. Entities may also declare attributes, affiliations, and other information, such as pages representing businesses, groups of users representing various organizations, and applications operating on social networking systems on behalf an entity. Users may also interact with these entities, providing more information about the users based on their interactions on the social networking systems. Social networking systems have been passively recording this information as part of the user experience, but social networking systems have lacked robust tools to use this information about users for targeting advertisements.
Specifically, the information available on social networking systems has not been used to define clusters of users of a social networking system that exhibit a particular attribute or have a particular affiliation, such as political party preference or interest in a niche topic such as “hipsters.” Social networking systems have not provided advertisers with targeting clusters that utilize the information available about the users of the social networking systems.